


Gifted

by 7CuteCreationImagination7



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Gen, Hurt Jim, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Star Trek (2009), Smart Kirk, Starfleet Academy, Tarsus IV, deserves to be protected at all costs, he is a precious butterfly of facts, really mild though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-24
Updated: 2017-10-24
Packaged: 2019-01-22 10:02:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12479048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/7CuteCreationImagination7/pseuds/7CuteCreationImagination7
Summary: James knows he is different. JT is sure he is really clever. Jimmy is smart but hates how his dad gets all the credit. Jim is a genius, he just wishes that someone would believe him. or 5 times Jim  wished that he wasn;t so smart, and the one time it wasn't so bad.





	Gifted

**Author's Note:**

> Hiya lovelies! I hope that this fanfic is good! God Bless

1( Age 7)  
James was bored, very bored. School was stupid. He had thought that maybe, once he started real school, it would change and he would learn new stuff, and he wouldn’t be bored. But no, it was worse.

At east at pre-school he could read whatever book he wanted, even if the teachers would giggle and point at him, cooing over the way his small hands struggled with the heavy Padd, as he tried to understand what gravity was.

Here he got told off for reading in class.Even if he knew how to multiply, divide and even do basic trigonometry ( Mrs Dawson didn’t believe him and put him in the corner for lying). The homework was the dullest thing ever, and he did not have the courage to ask Frank to sign the slip so he could move up to the next year. His arm still hurt from the last time he has asked Frank something.

He was hiding under his bed, with Sam’s textbook. This was interesting. He knew some of it already, but his big brother was in Secondary school, and that meant that he was learning cool stuff.

But, after half an hour, he realised that this book was not that interesting. He had read most of the curriculum in the summer, when Mom had forgotten her Padd for a week, and he got to look at stuff and read her engineering manuals. That had been fun.

He walked out of his room, big blue eyes peering out of the door. He walked out, careful not to step on the creaky floor boards, of the ancient house. There was one place where cool things were. The Attic.

He stepped up, and grinned. Jackpot. Lots of books, lay there in the dark and dusty attic, he wheezed as the dust filled his lungs, but his heart was thumping with excitement. Large books, with interesting titles like, “ Command 101”, “ Warp Cores: Why they are Revolutionary”, “Vulcan ,Card’issian and other Languages a Captain Needs to know”. This was amazing. 

He sat down, grunting as he pulled out a large Chemistry textbook, and began to read about isomers and polymers. He sat there in the dust, for hours, his brain absorbing all the information.

Until Sam came home.He didn’t hear the steps of his 12 year brother, until he heard his angrily whisper:

” James, what are you doing?”

“ I’m reading about nylon. It”s really cool, you just need a diamine and a dicarboxylic acid and then you make a spool with a glass ro-“

“ James, you aren’t Dad. You didn’t even meet him. You didn’t even know him! So stop reading his stuff, because you’ll just make Mom sad.Again”

“ But Sam, I wasn’t doing anything bad, and Dad’s textbooks are super inter-resting”

“ Just Shut Up! It’s your fault that Mom never comes home, for goodness sake James, stop trying to be Dad, its enough that you look like him, stop trying to be him!”

As the textbook was ripped out of his hands he sniffed, and watched as his brother angrily stomped downstairs. He winced as Frank began to yell.

Being bored was better, he though has tears began to stream down his cheeks. He had to hide that he was like Dad. He had to be boring.

 

2 ( Age 14-15)

This is the happiest that JT has been in years. Aunt Tanya and Uncle Jake care about him, and he is not bored at all. He loves Tarsus, because no-one knows who he is, and no-one but Aunt Tanya know that he has been sent of planet for crashing a car. He is just JT, the kid who hangs around Hoshi and is in all the advanced classes.

He arrives on Tarsus, six months after his fourteenth birthday, a miserable kid with weird bruises, who refuses to tell anyone why he has come alone, and not with a parent, guardian or at least a friend. 

A few months later his teacher calls him a “ ball of sunshine and facts” which pretty much sums his new self up.

The classes are actually interesting, which is amazing. Sure sometimes the 21 year old students gawk at the sight of him, but gradually they accept the fact that a teenager is better et them at Maths, Physics, Literature, Politics and Languages and is on par with them at Geography, Chemistry, Music, Economics and Ethics. ( He’d be lying if he said that he wasn’t just a bit smug)

And the classes after school with Hoshi are amazing. She teaches him Vulcan well enough that he freaks out the Vulcan ambassador ( well, he doesn’t freak out, but his eyebrows do disappear under his fringe which JT counts as a win), he is fluent in Andorian, Klingon, Romulan, and Q’atarindan, and is conversational in Russian, French, Card’issian and Spanish.

He is never bored, and when he isn’t learning or studying, he babysits the neighbours kids, from T’Pien who just asks for equations, her delicately pointed ears pricking up when he grabs his textbooks, to Leglan who runs around screaming, his green antennae waving about.

He still has more time, which he spends learning literature texts, his brain happily absorbing the information after years of being given nothing to do.

He can recite the whole play of “Hamlet”, it takes him four hours to learn it off by heart, and he passes out for a full twelve hour afterwards, but he is not bored, and people care— so he is happy.

Then things start getting weird.

Governor Kodos starts asking for him, so instead of playing with the neighbourhood kids, he is suddenly asked to take lessons on Diplomacy, Leadership and Strategy. He is exhausted, as Kodos seems to forget that he needs to sleep and keeps him studying until 1 in the morning everyday.

It isn’t until a day when Kodos is sick that he hacks into the mainframe, trying to look for a reason why Kodos is teaching him, and only him all this. The files have way too many barriers for the governor to be completely honest, and there is a nudging feeling in JT’s gut that something is not right.

His heart sinks as he reads of a deadly fungus that will kill all the crops within a week.

His hands shake with anger as he reads Kodos’ messages to Starfleet, rejecting replicators, imported food or interplanetary transport.

He cries as he reads his friends’, his families’ and his neighbours’, names on the “Unworthy List”. They are not unworthy. They are the first people to have ever cared about him. They do not deserve to be “eliminated”

He sobs as he sees his own, the image of the ominous words forever implanted in his mind:

“ James Tiberius Kirk.— Too intelligent, will not comply. Must be eliminated, rebellion is to be crushed”

A week later as he hides in a cave, protecting seventeen children, he wishes he had never applied for the advanced courses.

When Starfleet finally arrives, to pick up himself and the twelve remaining children he protected. To pick up their pitiful eyes and their frowns of suspicion; he wishes he had never come to Tarsus IV.

3( age 18)

After Tar— being … off planet… it took a while to get back into the swing of things. A year and a half is wasted drifting in and out of consciousness, and getting his body back to full strength. Jim finds it ironic that he now has more muscle and more bone than he has every had. He still can’t laugh about it, though.

Once the ship docks, two weeks after his seventeenth birthday (he only knows because one of the nurses told him, he has only celebrated one of his birthdays), and he has no clue.

He is not, going back to Riverside because, even though Winona ( he can’t call her mom not after this) is back there, Frank is gone and Sam is back, neither of them even commed him through this whole ordeal, and Captain Barnett (1) did send them messages every month.

First he enrols in Federation Academy, his stellar scores letting him easily breeze in, the interviewer practically drooling as he sheepishly admits to completing some university courses age 15.

He manages to convince them to let him do a Phd in Psychology, even though his best scores are in Politics, Languages, Engineering and Strategy.

He begins designing a psychological analysis test, a test to end all tests. A test which will be able to determine whether there is any chance that a person will want to harm another one in the future.  
( He doesn’t even try to fool himself that what he his designing has nothing to do with Kodos, he relishes it, hoping that he can prevent any type of genocide from occurring within the Federation of Planets ever again.)  
He travels to Russia, speaking so well that his friends call him “Yasha” and expect him to know Russian folk tales. He learns about ancient despots, like the Tsars, he reads of a man named Stalin, and decides that this test is needed more that he originally thought.

He travels to Germany, and as he reads of their history, he begins to study furiously, determined to make this work.  
He as bags under his eyes, but he does it. He completes his Phd in one year.

He defends his reasoning in from of the Federation boards, switching from language to language as he speaks to professors from different galaxies. 

He smiles proudly as the current head of Starfleet, Admiral Johnson, says that he will “think about” using it instead of the current psychological evaluations when looking for Presidents, Governors and Prime Ministers.

His happiness dissolves however, when Professor Reagan walks up to him afterwards and states  
“ You take just after your father! How proud he would be! I am sure that he would have done similarly well if he had pursued the social sciences instead of command. He took a minor in xenobiological psychology you kno-“

He blocks the Professor out, nods politely and plasters a fake smile on his face as he walks off.

Sitting in a bar an hour later, he bitterly thinks about how, though he has survived a genocide and broken records of age and time with his Phd, he still is overshadowed by his long dead father. 

The next few years are spend in a blur of anger and sadness as he is determined to fight his father’s shadow, his memories and the boredom of not knowing what to do.

 

4 ( Age 22)  
He doesn’t want to admit it, but he loves Starfleet. He is finally being challenged again, his brain thrumming with information, without the frantic desperation of his Phd, or the looming of a sociopathic Governor.

He does, however, choose to do things differently. He refuses to let anyone, except Bones and his Pike, know about his intelligence. He has hacked his files to change them so many times that it is practically routine, and though he doesn’t particularly like the person on them — a rich spoilt brat who has never had to work a day in his life, and chooses to break the law for fun—, it means that no one asks any questions like “ How did you finish your education so fast, i thought they only taught like that on colony planets” or “ You finished a Phd in a year when you were 18, which degrees did you do?”

He does not, however dumb himself down. He just keeps his test scores to himself, and if people want to believe that he is just joining clubs to gain extra credit, well since when has he cared what they think.

It is tiring, though, taking not one, but two tracks, ( Command and Engineering) and planning to finish them in three years. Bones knows this and gives him sleeping hypos when his brain will just not shut down. In turn he does Bones’s neurobiology and psychology notes for him, because this is the first proper friend he has ever had, and he is very grateful.

He becomes the leader of the orchestra, where he meets Pavel, and since he can play every instrument ( those six months spent on the Starship: Nightingale as an angst 16 year old got boring, okay) no one cares about his fake reputation.

He knows that teachers are beginning to talk, about the startling differences between his test scores and his “attitude” (facade, these are meant to be professors, surely at least one of them can read basic body language and see that this is an act!)

It starts going wrong when Professor Ka’rtlin calls up a panel to accuse him of cheating. This starts a ripple effect, where all the Science department of the academy calls him out for plagiarism. This snowballs, until he has almost all of his professors questioning him, asking him to write in paper without his Padd, or giving a strange amount of “Pop Quizzes”. His classmates hate him in turn.

Finally, they call up a board investigation, with the Heads and Deputy heads of every department staring down at him.

He regrets following Pike’s advice, he regrets going into Starfleet and tries to think of a way that he can convince Pike to come back to Earth, for a week, please.  
He stares at them, and smiles coldly. These are pompous teachers which feel threatened that a student does not conform to their expectations, and might be smarter than them, he has dealt with these before.

He calmly reaches for his Padd, and asks if he can show them his unencrypted file, ( not fully unencrypted obviously, they don’t need to know the gory details of the “WinonaFrankKodos” parts of his life, just his academic achievements.

As the scanner goes down over his Padd, designed to check if what he has written is true, he waits in anticipation.

He states, “ Before the questioning begins I would like you to read through my unencrypted file, just to check that that doesn’t change anything”

He refrains from laughing at their faces of shame, shock and confusion. They didn’t expect the kid who is just “riding on his father’s coat tails” to have degrees in War Strategy, Politics, Mathematics and Nuclear Astrophysics, Masters in Fungal Biology, Warp Core designs and Xenosociology and a Phd in Psychology. As their faces redden in embarrassment, he decided to be brutal.

“ Can I ask for the reason of my questioning” he asks  
Prosessor Xantau looks at him sadly and says, “ Your’e more than you look kid, we ‘pologise, you can leave and uh… lets just forget about this”

He walks out, and when his teachers all look at him in both embarrassment and excitement, he wishes he could just be normal.

5 ( age 24)

He is shattered. He is a mess. He was the Acting Captain of the Starship: Enterprise for two weeks, and it doesn’t make sense.

He isn’t sleeping, because watching Pike almost die to save his crew, plus witnessing yet another genocide, really has not brought up any good memories, or made new ones. Jim doesn’t know how to apologise to Spock, doesn’t know why so many people at the Academy hate him, and is utterly fed up.

The final straw comes when he is called up for a “ Federation of Planets Investigation”, which is just bureaucratic for “ Brutal Interrogation”.  
He walks in, sees the faces of Admirals, scowling down at him, and knows that he is screwed.Completely and utterly screwed.

Admiral Nogura (whom frankly has always hated his guts) glares at him, and almost gleefully states  
” We are bringing you, James Tiberius Kirk under investigation for Mutiny, Sabotage, and Falsification of Academy Documents. These charges are being applied to your forceful seize of command on the USS Enterprise, your suspicious and obscene attack on Commander Spock, and your ridiculous insinuation that you are completing two tracks, within three years at Starfleet Academy”  
At this, Kirk is livid. Sure, he gets the charges for mutiny, and even his attack on Spock (Sabotage is a bit harsh though), but he is furious at the insinuation that he has cheated his way to the top, and he is nothing but a fraud. These despotic cretins know nothing about him but his very falsified file, and yet because they have a vague idea who his dad is, and how many times he has broken the law, they think they know him through and through.”

He runs his hands over his face, as the pure exhaustion in his blood boils into determination and fury.

Marcus speaks, “ Do you deny these charges?”, and as Jim fights the urge to punch the smug smirk off Marcus’ face, he decides that he is going to be honest.  
Being honest to them is a bit cruel, and mean but they do deserve it, so yeah, he is going to utterly slaughter them with the truth.

“ I did seize command of the USS Enterprise, after Captain Pike was captured by Romulans, and placed me as First officer, and the Acting Captain Spock declared himself emotionally compromised after Vulcan was …. gone.  
Whilst I also do not deny that I did have to unfairly convince Mr Spock to declare himself emotionally compromised, I deemed it preposterous that he should remain in command, after 28 hours on the Bridge, the genocide of his planet and the death of his mother.”  
The Faces of the Admirals twist in confusion at his wide range of vocabulary, his eloquence and his logic. He knows he should feel smug, but he just feels weary, and wants to get this over with

“ I have already apologised for the Kobayashi Maru issue, and was pardoned by Captain Pike for smuggling my self on board the ship so I will assume they are not issues.  
Finally, it is not ridiculous that I have taken two Tracks in three years. I am a genius. I published three works to the late Vulcan Science Academy, which were accepted as part of the curriculum two years ago. they were under the pseudonym, Kelvin Tiber.  
I have a Phd in Psychology, Masters in three subjects, and many more degrees. I can speak 20 languages fluently. I am not a cheat, I am not my father’s legacy and I am not an idiot”

He stares at their awestruck faces as they confirm his sayings. He really wishes he could just get them to conclude this meeting, so he can ask Bones for a nice hefty sedative.

The meeting continues for two more hours, because whilst half the Admirals are intimidated or jealous of his intelligence, the other half seem determined to get him to “confess” that he is lying.

As the Admirals sheepishly walk out, or angrily stalk away from him, he yawns pitifully. He can’t help but think that, maybe in the other world, he isn’t this smart ands life is a lot easier. He bitterly muses that, if he were less intelligent, his life would have been better.

 

+1( age 25)  
This is it. The end of his time at Starfleet Academy. He is ecstatic, because he will graduate, and he will be able to work on a ship and this is everything he has ever dreamed of.

He sits at the back, thinking that he will graduate, and that will be it and they hopefully won’t mention the fact that has done two tracks, or that he has gotten 100% on over half of his papers, or any of that.

It’s not that he isn’t proud of himself, it’s just that he very much doubts that anyone will believe that he had none it. And he is so not going to suffer cheating accusations, or people talking about his fathers achievements again.

He gets his certificates, no-one but Bones and maybe Pike paying attention to him, as he is forgotten in the hundreds of students graduating that year. As the ceremony is about to end, everyone having grabbed their certificates, thrown their caps up and listened to Professors speaking of hope, the future and their responsibilities as Starfleet Alumni ; Jim sighs in relief as it seems that no-one is going to point out the odd number of certificates on his lap, or the fact that he is a third year and not a fourth year.

This bubble of hopefulness bursts when Admiral Barnett steps up on the podium, and winks straight at him, maintaining eye contact as he announces

“ This year, has been very difficult for all of us. But I am a firm believer in the motto of Starfleet, “Ad astra per aspera” Through hardship to the stars. There are two people who have worked hard and have achieved the most out of all of us here. I won’t embarrass them by forcing them to come up here, but I will mention their names as their achievements should not go unnoticed”

As Jim internally winces, he smiles ,watching Pavel turn an amusing shade of red, his friends smirking at him and patting his back, as Barnett continues

“ The first, has broken the record for the youngest person to ever have graduated from Star-fleet, he has beaten the record for the highest score on a transporter theory paper. It is Mr Pavel Chekov!”

“ The second, is probably plotting my demise as I tell you of his achievements, but they deserve to be heard. He has completed not one but two tracks, both Command and Engineering and completed them in three years. He has broken 15 records with his papers due to their length, their logic and their innovation. He was the 25th youngest person to ever enter Starfleet Academy.”

At this, Barnett pauses, everyone looking around in confusion and bewilderment, searching for the “mystery genius”. Bones is boring his eyes through his skull and Pike is just looking very smug and proud.

Then Barnett seals his fate, “ This is, of course James T Kirk. Well then, I congratulate, you both and everyone else. There are refreshments in the hall.Goodbye”

Some, not recognising the name walk out, the other three quarters turn to gawk at him. 

He expected looks of cynicism, anger and envy. Not this.

He wasn’t expecting the looks of curiosity, respect and pride. He wasn’t expecting people to be this decent.

As Jim walks out, for once feeling proud of his intelligence, he smiles. He is a genius, and he loves it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. Any constructive criticism would be appreciated. Thank you and God bless :)  
> (1) Captain Barnett-- I know that most people think that Pike was the one who got him off Tarsus, but I think that they would have been closer of they had. Especially since the way that Pike introduces himself to Jim in ST:2009, is that of a stranger.


End file.
